Crypt of the Moon Spider (Lunar Gothic Trilogy, #1)

by Nathan Ballingrud

Veronica recalled a local myth, which held that the moon was the inhabited skull of a long-dead god who once trod the dark pathways of space like a king through his star-curtained palace. Looking down upon it now, she could almost believe it. The moon seemed to exude a deathly energy, the way she imagined the bones of a holy animal might. It would not have seemed strange to see a population of ghostly horses galloping across the dusty expanse.

But she was. She felt a curious sluggishness, a kind of separation, as though she’d become loosened from time and was jostling in its socket. She was afraid the wrong movement or word might disconnect her entirely, sending her reeling backward over the course of her own life. She did not want to live through it a second time, so she closed her eyes and thought hard about staying precisely where she was. Her husband joined his other hand with the first, engulfing her own. “Veronica, it’s true. There is nothing to fear here. It’s a new beginning.” She nodded, but kept her lips clamped together. What wanted to come out was nothing she wanted to say, and nothing he wanted to hear. She tried to believe him. This was 1923, after all, not the Dark Ages. She was not coming here to have an exorcism performed. She was coming here to be cured. It was expensive and he had spent a great deal of money to give her—to give them both—this chance. She was determined to be grateful.

A hard wind kicked up, buffeting their little shuttle. Her husband gripped her hand tightly; he disliked flying, and this adventure would set his dreams at a disagreeable pitch for weeks to come. She felt a flutter of delight at the thought, and stamped it out immediately.

Other than the grassy field, Barrowfield Home was completely enclosed by the forest. There seemed to be no way in or out of the place except by shuttle.

A rough-looking, heavyset man stepped aboard. His body looked pale and unfinished, like something wriggled up from the earth. Like a grub. He was smartly dressed in white-and-cream-colored clothing, creating a dissonance she found both grotesque and mildly disquieting—a worm wrapped in a gentleman’s waistcoat. He limped toward them and said, “The Brinkleys, right?” His voice was coarse and uncultured, thickly Brooklyn; Veronica felt it presented a poor first impression of the Home.

Her husband allowed himself to be guided to the receptionist’s desk, where, with the scrawl of his signature, the custody of Veronica Brinkley was transferred from himself to the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, where she was to be treated until sane, however long it might take. “Do you want to meet the doctor?” Grub directed the

“I tried to kill myself.” The casual way he said it horrified her. It sounded a note inside her, like the tolling bell of a secret annihilating church buried in her heart.

alembics

“Has it occurred to you that your aversion to treatment is a symptom of your illness?”

a group of prospectors and landbreakers were said to have discovered the lair of a Moon Spider—a massive creature supposedly possessed of psychic properties—buried deep in the moon’s rock. Exactly what transpired there was never reported.

Soma.

Body as distinct from mind, soul or spirit.

“What do you put in?” Dr. Cull smiled. “Spider silk,” he said. “The lunar silk is a remarkable neural conductor. Imagine the leper, his gangrenous flesh sloughed away, and something new—better, healthier—sewn into its place. A flesh that completely integrates with the healthy body. It’s the same thing.”

He was simply a doctor again: a cold function, a knife held at the ready.

There were no windows;

No windows anywhere in Barrowfield House.

On the night before everything changed, she heard the lullaby in her sleep. Not the child’s doggerel she had written herself, but the meandering, unmelodic tune she had set it to. She dreamed of a black gulf. Something swam in its depths, just beyond her sight.

“Dr. Cull was screaming at someone. Someone standing by my head. But the funny thing is, I wasn’t looking out of my own eyes. I was looking at my body from somewhere else.” “Maybe you had an astral experience. I’ve heard the soul can—” “No. It was from behind a glass on the shelf. A few feet to one side. Like I was in a jar. I don’t think he had any idea I was awake. There was blood on the floor. That big one was there, the one who always takes us to our rooms.”

The next morning, while Charlie was anesthetized, Dr. Cull opened the top of his head and began removing large portions of his brain. Cull removed his yearning for love, his self-reflection, his hopes for a return to New York and to Maggie’s good graces. He left in place the brutality and the desire to serve. He made Charlie Duchamp, as much as he was able, into an extension of his own will: a clenched fist; a grip at the throat.

When successful, though, the webbing filled the brain’s missing places with minimal side effects. And so the remainder of Charlie’s brain combined with the rags of an older intelligence, and for the rest of his life Charlie’s dreams were seasoned with memories of a dead colossus: the ice seas of Europa, the storm-cities of Neptune, the mausoleum ships drifting beyond the solar system’s edge.

“Remember when I told you the other night about how the moon might be the remains of an ancient being?” Charlie did not think that a question worth answering. “There are other moons, Charlie. What if they’re like this one? What if our planets are surrounded by dead gods and all their hidden knowledge? What if they’re still alive? What are they doing? What are they for? How can we use them? I’m sending a part of your brain to find out. And if you find it, you’ll use that new knowledge to come back and tell me.”

Running across the tops of the trees, she turned her eye to the blue and green sliver of Earth. She peered down through the long gulf until she found the little girl staring back up at her, a flag of life in the blowing wheat.